I’m gonna guess the original version of this joke said “crashed” instead of “fell over”, cause then it would actually be ambiguous enough for the premise to work.

Time to find out if someone else has access, and can make a copy and send it to you, and then you can play dumb about where/how you got your copy.

Wasn’t there a study that found if you tell people you’re working on something, you get the same brain reward chemicals as if you actually did it and told everyone? So if you tell people before you’re done, you might just go “meh, I’m good, the rest sounds hard”. Or something like that.